View full sizeMaple Heights Mayor Jeff Lansky makes no apologies for his over-the-top rant against FirstEnergy.

Maple Heights Mayor Jeffrey Lansky is amped up over FirstEnergy Corp., which supplies electricity to his city of 25,000 residents.

He thinks the utility, which provides power to most of us in Northeast Ohio, delivers lousy service.

Normally, I'd ignore such a common complaint. But Lansky recently offered a spectacular rant against FirstEnergy that commands attention.

In a Feb. 22 letter to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, Lansky charges that FirstEnergy is "too crooked to fail" and asks the commission to investigate the company for, among other things, failing to quickly restore power in his city after last October's super storm Sandy.

The letter, which is full of words in all caps, reads like the rants you might hear from a gadfly or crank shouting from the back of a public hearing.

"'Treason doth never prosper,' wrote an English poet; what's the reason? Well, if it prospers, none dare call it treason!" Lansky offers in his letter.

He also turns to Hitler to make a point, making the common mistake of mis-attributing a quote to him.

"Hitler always said the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it," Lansky writes, arguing that FirstEnergy repeatedly lied about when power would be restored to some 3,000 homes in the community.

Movie character Gordon Geckko, rapper MC Hammer and presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush also make an appearance in his two-and-a-half page letter, which you can read below this column.

The letter is immature and unbecoming of a public official. Lansky should be embarrassed.

He's not.

"It may be over the top, but I don't think the letter went far enough," he told me.

Lansky, who is in his second term and was council president for years, said he's detailed enough problems with FirstEnergy to justify his exasperation. He said the company and employees such as Self don't return calls and emails and ignore on-going concerns.

"We always get the royal runaround from FirstEnergy," he said.

FirstEnergy spokesman Todd Schneider told me company officials have never seen a letter like it.

"It almost doesn't justify a response," Schneider said. "It's highly insulting and doesn't reflect the truth of our restoration effort during hurricane Sandy. We welcome and encourage constructive criticism to improve customer service, but insulting the integrity of our company and employees is not productive."

The biggest problem I have with Lansky's letter is that its churlishness and theatrics obscure some legitimate complaints.

The letter points out that his residents waited three days after Sandy for the first repair truck to arrive. And that truck was from Indiana. He says FirstEnergy made the situation worse by not being straight with city officials about its timetable for repairs.

Schneider says FirstEnergy sent 50 line mechanics from the utility's Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. to the East Coast to help with Sandy. He says FirstEnergy called on utility companies in neighboring states to not only replace workers who left but to beef up crews here.

"We typically have 300 linemen a day working in CEI territory," he said. "By the time Sandy passed, we had 800 working here."

Schneider added that "just because you don't see a truck in a particular neighborhood doesn't mean we are not working on the line somewhere else."

Lansky doesn't buy it. He says the utility was unprepared and let down its customers.

Lansky's biggest criticism, though, has nothing to do with the storm. It's FirstEnergy's neglect of utility poles, trees and street lights.

Last December, for instance, the city's service department provided FirstEnergy with an aerial photograph of the Libby Road Bridge marked with arrows identifying the street lights that don't work. The city also tagged the actual light poles with yellow caution tape to make it impossible for FirstEnergy workers to miss.

Self told the Maple Heights service department assistant that he would visit the bridge to "get some better information on the lights in question" and then record the information in the company's computer tracking system.

"Repairs will likely be made next week," he promised in an email, which Lansky attached to his letter.

Guess what? The lights are still not fixed.

This should outrage residents of Maple Heights. They pay a special tax to the city for street lights which gets passed to FirstEnergy. (Lansky says he is contemplating withholding current payments until the lights are fixed. He wants other cities to do the same.)

Schneider says FirstEnergy relies on residents and city officials to provide specific location and pole numbers, which are tracked. He says that when the company is alerted to a problem, it makes repairs within three days if the problem is simply a busted light bulb; 10 days if the problem is a related to the pole's wiring.

"We are meeting that goal," he said.

He said he didn't have the background on the Libby Road bridge complaint.

Burned-out streetlights are a problem we hear about all the time. I can't understand why it's such a challenge compared to, say, running a nuclear power plant.

Lansky ends his letter with a screed against FirstEnergy CEO Tony Alexander for his decision to spend $100 million to buy the naming rights to Cleveland Browns Stadium. The deal is "a ponzi-like scheme right out of the Wall Street bank bailout," Lansky writes.

I'll leave the naming rights issue alone. That deserves its own column.

Taken as a whole, the Lansky letter is over the top and will prove counterproductive. He should take it back and, even, apologize.

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